The Winter of My (sometimes) Discontent

My teacher from LA used to say to me: “Keegan, you’re like a guilt machine. I could put a quarter in your mouth, pull your arm and guilt would come pouring out.” Sadly, it has always been true of me, that guilt has been a pox upon my proverbial house, but this instance seems to particularly be niggling at me. It is indeed nonsense to feel sorry for yourself when there is war and famine and cancer and cruelties and misfortunes by the thousands every day, but it is also a particular crime to wish for a different life when you are staring full-faced at the one thing that came from all that - and she’s perfect. So I feel guilty that I could ever wish for things to have gone differently because this lovely child of mine is the most incredible incarnation resulting from every decision I have ever made, good or bad. Yes, I realize that, as with deaths or miscarriages or broken marriages I would have loved ‘the other’ child just the same, but it would not be a right and good world to me without this child, without Nahanni -- and yet...

And yet.

I cannot help but wish that my career path had gone differently, that I had known better, that circumstance would not have interfered the way it happened to do. I rather miss having a very good six-figure income and I miss red carpets and magazines and the security (both financial and psychological) of having a series. I also miss getting to play characters into which I could really throw myself, challenging myself to live in their skin, if only for a short while. I miss all that very much and I think often of Deepak Chopra’s ‘7 Spiritual Laws of Success’ where he talked about the fact that if you take your success from things like cars or cash or careers that when they go, so too will your self-esteem. I have held fast to that since I first heard it on one of my long, lonely drives down to LA and I understood that I would always have to fight the notion that ‘me’ and ‘my work’ were one and the same; that being especially true in a business where degrees of success seem very gray indeed, where you aren’t really considered successful unless you are famous and you can be famous without ever having done a damned thing of any merit.

Of course, I adore Nahanni and what she has brought to my life, to our life, far outstrips any red carpet experience. The bins of (um, largely unanswered...sorry) fanmail downstairs weigh nothing in comparison to the stark wonder and beauty of having this child.

And yet.

It’s just hard to reconcile sometimes, but particularly right now while this interminable strike drags on and I am watching the walls of the business that has been building and thriving in Vancouver begin to sink in on themselves and I am wondering, along with the 40,000 or so other film professionals in this city what will become of us. It is all good and well to think that we could all move to LA and start again, but we are not all 20 any more and some things just aren’t as available as they once were. And, truth be told, the same things that held me back from making a wholesale move there are truer today than they were in the throes of it all. Granted I was absolutely ready and preparing to move us down there when 911 happened (and one can hardly complain about its effects on one’s career when the real tragedies are so baldly apparent) and then again when the dust had settled some and then I got Jake 2.0 which, of course, filmed up here. And then there was the sagging dollar, and the fact that it would cost me $10,000 to do pilot season for a few months, and I simply sometimes just missed my home and my husband and my cats and my life. But there was also a very large political element; I was never really able to separate my politics from my career - I really, genuinely struggled with the idea of living in the US, with its lack of health care, with its actor/governor, with its highly questionable President (about which I could, as a non-citizen, do nothing about, ever). I struggled with the sheer crush and volume of people, with the blatant celebration of riches and vanity that is such a major part of the fabric of Los Angeles, the vast chasm between rich and poor that is so evident there, with the traffic and the concrete and the brown, hazy blanket of sky that depressed me so much I just stopped looking up. I could never quite feel comfortable there knowing two of my closest friends there had both been robbed at gunpoint, with the helicopters circling in the sky like locusts, their long, harsh lights stabbing the night like tentacles of some horrid mechanical octopus, searching for the man who’d shot the bank security guard in bald-faced daylight only blocks from where I lived -- on the edges of Beverly Hills. Or the two times I was at the grocery store down the street when someone got stabbed. It always interfered with my notion of what I wanted for my career - the things which I wanted for my life.

And now I have her and even more than ever health care and liberal politics and clean air and safe streets matter to me and so I find myself wondering what the hell to do if the whole thing falls to pieces here, if the industry collapses in on itself. It is very possible that the dollar will fall some, the government will make some concessions and tax breaks and we will once again have small scraps from the American table to sustain us. But I wonder, along with many others what will become of us now that we have learned to rely so heavily on the US and have not learned to fend for ourselves. A producer from Vancouver recently said that we should have had more foresight, what did we expect being a ‘service industry’ - and he’s right, but still, where does it leave any of us? I suppose we are still, as they say in reference to our role in the industry, 'Mexicans in sweaters'.

All I know is that I am a mother first and an actress second. It surprises me to find myself here, when my whole life, even in university and while I traipsed around as much of Europe as I could see on my meagre savings, I have always wanted to be an actor, have always felt born to it. I honestly do not know quite how to reconcile myself to the fact that I let things like my politics and, if I am honest, my fears too, to get in the way, but I also know that I have tried for many, many years to build for myself a simple life, based on core values that I feel would sustain me whether people liked me or not, whether I was famous or not, whether I had fans or covers or awards or money...or not. I have a daughter now and I know that the way I want, we want to raise her is not terribly conducive with the environment in LA (which is not to say that there are not people there raising perfectly wonderful families, of course) and so I wonder where that leaves me. I know that I want her to have opportunities, but I also want her to live in nature, to know rapidly running rivers and tall trees and high mountains and clean air and peace and safety and the simplicity to believe that what she looks like and what kind of car we drive is not the sum total of her value. I am not a fool, I know these issues are endemic to the Western life in general, but I can make choices to mitigate the effects of those things and I think where and how we choose to live is a big part of that. The only problem is wondering what the hell to do now if the bottom falls out.

Yes, sometimes I do wish it had gone differently, that the things I know now I could have known then, but who is immune to that notion? Besides, when I step into my daughter’s room in the morning and she raises her gorgeous tousled curls to me and I see those sable-lashed brown eyes that I somehow made, I know all is as right as it can be and that as all roads once led to Rome, all that I have has lead me to her, and her to me and together we will walk the next fork in the road and live the next part of the adventure in all its glory and all its pain and that there will be lessons and regrets there too, but I will always know that I did it for her. And I will never feel guilty about that.

Things change in life and when we do not learn to change and roll with them, we stagnate. We boil in our own broth of resentment and self-pity and I am not interested in the flavour of that bitter stew, though I have tasted it often enough. All I have every really wanted was to live a life less ordinary, and I have done so in myriad ways. Some has been because of movies; strutting the red carpet at Madison Square Gardens and parties with Ben Affleck and Renee Zellweger and shooting a movie in the incredible Suleman Mosque in Istanbul and kayaking down seething rivers and making babies in the stark wilderness of a Yukon river trip. I live to do the things that are outside the box and truthfully, when I stare down the thought of living in a $900,000 Stepford townhouse in the suburbs of Vancouver for 20 years I shudder. Frankly, that scares me more than not being an actress anymore. We continue to dream of the crazy schemes that populate our wishing hours, the mothership business, the lodge in Costa Rica, the rafting company we've been trying to buy for years so that Ez can have his dreams too. I've been thinking a lot about that lately and I'm starting to look at this chaos as containing opportunity (I don't have that tattoo for nothing...) If it is all about to fall apart, perhaps this is the time to run out into the jungle of our next adventure, to live a different life less ordinary. I think of how Ez has, for more than a decade, subjugated his dreams, his path, so that I could follow mine and I wonder if it is time to let him have his dream before it is too late, before his body, which he has been very rough on, decides it is not interested in being cold and wet and filled with adrenaline. Before we settle into some sleepy suburban waking-dream from which we do not rouse until it is too late.

Now that would be something to feel guilty about.

Even Baby Steps are Big

When you are nine months old there are a lot of things to figure out. Funnily enough, the same seems true of being in your, um, very late twenties... It never seems to end, the learning and while it is always a good thing to learn, it can be painful.

Nahanni is adjusting wonderfully to her life as a mobile citizen of the world. She cruises around more quickly every day, her dexterity and her control are increasing exponentially and every day there is something new to report when daddy comes home. She has lately taken to releasing her grip from things and attempts to stand on her own, sometimes with spectacularly undesirable consequences. Why just this morning I watched her go from gleefully smacking the lid of the toilet like a drum (yes, I cleaned it) to a very unwieldy porcelain facewash which left her, understandably, in tears. We then sing our little 'baby goes boom' song and I find some way to distract her from the painful lessons of the newly mobile. They are tough lessons, but necessary, and it seems an apt metaphor for where I am in my life too. I too am trying to learn how to navigate this world in which I find myself; to organize babysitting and activities and to somehow not completely subjugate my own life in the meantime. As she learns new things, expands her universe it seems somedays as though mine has shrunken down to the size of this apartment, to the size of the little sphere in which she and I rotate around one another. But we are learning, both of us, although sadly, no one is here to scoop me up and sing any 'mommy goes boom' songs. Perhaps I should write one...

I am so proud of her though, in a million ways. She is an absolutely delightful child, and that goes beyond just the blind parental love that we all feel for our own. This little girl is so happy and easy-going I don't know what I have done to deserve her. For all my issues surrounding sleep, suffering those nights of teething, it really hasn't been bad -- I just am a person who so desperately needs sleep, like food and water and air, I cannot survive with out scads of it and so that was hard, but she had been sleeping 7-to-7 now for quite some time and I feel blessed by that and so many other things about her. She is so big now in my arms that sometimes she is the weight of sadness; I hate to see her growing so fast. But at the same time she now likes to tuck her thumb into her mouth and press her downy little head into my neck when we get ready for sleepy time and I feel intoxicated by the very smell of her beneath my nose. I know cuddles like this will not last forever so I hoard them like treasure.

Language is something that comes naturally to me and so we study a lot during the day, flash cards with pictures and four or five languages that I repeat in the hopes that she will grasp them easily and become a multi-lingual genius. We do Spanish and French and ASL and she is so funny when she gets something new. She has begun to say 'duck' and (b)anana and she makes the most hilarious sign for bear I have ever seen. I love to pull out the Eric Carle book 'Brown Bear' just to see her little arms waving in the air, making the sign. And of course, she has been making the piggy noise for ages and we never tire of pulling our pictures of pigs to entice her to scrunch up little face and snort. Whenever we are reading I get her to look at me while I make the sign and it is so funny to see her raise those big brown eyes, studded with feathery lashes, seeking to learn it. The only problem now is that my rather limited supply of signs is coming to its end and I will soon have to learn more. I admit, I don't enjoy every minute; sometimes it can be exceedingly tedious being home all day with a baby, but I can tell you I enjoy the vast majority of my time here with her. I am a fortunate soul indeed.

She has her baby steps and I have mine. I've been talking to the program liaison at UBC's Creative Writing Program, ordering my transcripts from WLU (which frightens me in much the same way dealing with my financial life does, but I'm starting to really leap into that fear-filled little playground too...) but the point is, I too am learning to walk -- learning to walk in the new light that has come with me becoming a mother and all the challenges and joys that come with it. We will both fall, we will both have times when we just need to cry, but I think of those first real steps, the ones which feel the most victorious and I know that we will both run after that.

On solid foods and other perils

Since Nahanni was a tiny speck of atomic energy pulsing within me, everything has been conspiring to kill her. I remember those breathless first weeks, afraid of every little thing, deathly afraid that something might kill this life that was quickly, but oh so slowly knitting itself together deep inside me. All along the way there have been things to worry about, the first 3 month milestone, the triple-screen testing, aspartame and water quality and nitrates and ... birth. It is a dangerous process, being alive, and it doesn't stop until the very end. And now, the latest peril...solid foods.

Not since the poor, delicate, sleep-deprived princess of yore has the humble pea presented such a danger to life. Since I first began feeding Nahanni solids, I have been terrified of her choking. I remember being at a mommy group and one of the little one-year old boys choking on a raisin and his mother looking up at us with abject helplessness before it finally dislodged and I have never been able to wash that look from my mind's eye. (Incidentally, the little boy simply stood back up, wiped his teary little eyes and moved on, completely unfazed...unlike the rest of us who took a good fifteen minutes to catch our breath...) When I first fed her peas I would nick the thin skin and squeeze out the tiny jade spheres and split them in two to feed her, one at a time, an agonizingly slow process that would eat up half my day, I swear. Gradually we were able to move towards other solids, tiny shards of apple (organic, of course, I wouldn't want to kill her with the myriad chemicals they tell us litter all our foods - it's a wonder any of us are still alive) and slivers of soft, mordant avocado. Feeding a young baby in winter certainly makes the 100-mile diet a distant impossibility and all intentions I have had for local and seasonal have been thrust to the wayside in favour of safety. I don't care that mangoes are not native to Vancouver, I can give her a slice and breathe easy while she gnaws away at the golden flesh. She has been rapidly advancing through foods, and I can admit that I take pride in the fact that my child is willing to eat some very un-babyfood baby food.

We have come to love a little restaurant on Main street called 'East is East', a funky little organic restaurant that serves Middle Eastern/Indian inspired dishes that are so delicious and invigorating that every time we go I drive Ez crazy saying 'Oh, I love this place - did I tell you that?'. We have fed her little spoons of spicy lentil stew, mango-butternut puree and mughal chicken and she hums her approval and reaches out for more. She'll eat anything really, and she is surprisingly unafraid of even very spicy food that one would not typically think a baby would enjoy. They tell me this will change, that she will begin to reject all these herring fillets and cumin scented chicken thighs and I will have a fussy eater like everyone else, but I am remaining steadfastly disbelieving. My child is quite exceptional, don't they know that??

Then again, all is well until you put more than one morsel in front of her. Then suddenly she abandons all reason and shoves as many of the pieces into her mouth as she can manage, and it is enough to reignite all the choking fears I have harboured throughout this learning process. Case in point, a few weeks ago we were working with apples again, although not the soft, pinchable chunks of MacIntoshes that we had been using, but the harder Fujis. I made the grievous error of placing tiny squares before her while I cut up some more avocado and she stuffed all of them into the little mouth which still contained remnants of the rest of lunch within its deceptive corridors. She coughed, she sputtered - but being a seasoned mom, I've seen this before...so I waited, and waited...but the sputtering continued and her little face turned red and tears spilled from her wide eyes as I realized 'Oh my god, she really is choking!'. A sense of panic welled up inside me and I berated myself for missing that baby first-aid course (see Rotten Mother 101.9) I flew to pick her up and POP! the offending chunk of apple clucked itself outward in a lovely arc and landed wetly on my shirt. She looked at me and I at her and I was so relieved I laughed and she happily joined in with me, her little pearly toothbuds gleaming green with avocadoey goodness.

And I breathed a little sigh of relief - the body knows what it is doing. Not to say that accidents don't happen - they clearly do, but really, the body is a very clever organism and it is very fond of surviving. I never leave her side while she eats anything suspect and I can feel reasonably confident that the chunk of banana that she is currently sculpting will not kill her if I move into the kitchen briefly to wet another cloth in attempt to minimize her debris field. One more fear somewhat allayed. Although really, it is only being replaced by the new fears that come with a baby on the move. So far she hasn't choked to death, but she is not a very good stuntwoman thus far and I have to watch her cruising very carefully for it seems that as soon as I turn my back she is most prone to head-banging episodes that leave her more shaken than hurt, but nonetheless with her very dramatic faucet of tears streaming down her pink round cheeks. Once again I say thank goodness for the cranium. Now if I can only get her to stop eating wisps of cat hair she gathers from the couch, or to stop poking her finger into little piles I've missed and popping her little finger into her mouth like some sort of dried food archaeologist I will be happy indeed. Ah, thank goodness for the immune system...

Kermit was wrong, it is easy being green

I'm a green kinda gal, I have been for many years. Now, while it does include the fact that jealousy is somewhat inherent in my personality, what I'm really talking about here is environmentally green. I've diligently separated my glass from my plastics for years (well, until recently when I saw that the truck simply dumps all the bins into one giant receptacle which will later be sorted during processing) and I do whatever I can to be kind to the environment which my child (and yours) will inherit. I remember when I first started talking about wanting to use cloth diapers, before Nahanni was even born and people looked at me slightly askance, like they do with people when they are trying to discern what mental illness they might be suffering from. One friend put the general opinion quite succinctly: "Take the bus", the underlying message being 'It's too much trouble!".

I think this is a culture which is quick to fall back on the convenient rather than put out the effort to at least try the more friendly alternative. I've popped open the lid of my mother's garbage can to discover the glint of diet Coke cans and necks of beer bottles poking up and mocking me - but her recycling is 15 floors down and I know my lectures will fall on deaf ears. I will even admit that I wondered if I was crazy to be thinking of cloth diapers after using the diaper service when Nahanni was born. I recall my reaction that first day as something along the lines of 'this is completely disgusting' in the manner that only newborn diapers (and I suppose those of the elderly...but that's a blog I'm not going near) can be. The square, starchy white pads of cotton would leave her soaked from stem to stern and I admit they did not thrill me, I began to wonder if I should start taking the bus...

Next I tried the very popular 'g-diaper' system which is finally available in Canada (www.gdiapers.com) at Whole Paycheck...er, I mean, Whole Foods. Even Julia Roberts has touted the wonders of these enviro bums, and I can say that I felt a certain strange kinship knowing that she too was somewhere splitting open the wood pulp liners and swishing that ochre mess in the toilet. See, the stars are just like us! I hope it will not be the only thing I ever have in common with Julia. But I digress. I did love the little g's, with their bright colours and patterns and I loved the mix of the convenience of a disposable with the enviro sensibility of reusables, but at $20 per 32-pack of liners (plus the initial outlay for the covers) they proved to be costly - literally twice as much as disposables. I started to wonder what to do and then I received an email from one of my mommy groups introducing a mompreneur's company called 'New & Green Baby' (www.newandgreen.com) which had a trial service for almost every kind of cloth diaper going, from pre-folds to the fabulous all-in-ones that are pretty much as simple as a disposable -- just velcro and go. I tried them out for a week or so and was sold! I bought a variety of pocket diapers, mainly bum genius, which are one-size and can adjust to fit a baby from birth to toilet-training (very cost effective) and my personal favourites, the Monkey Doodlez all-in-ones that come in the most scrumptious colours like raspberry and tangerine and are really low profile under clothes, something many cloth diapers admittedly are not. I think people are always surprised when they see me changing her and see that we are using, even going out with cloth diapers and how beautiful and soft and colourful they can be. I've even taken it one step further and use sherpa wipes (fabulous soft and ultra absorbent wipes) instead of throwaways. We've always used water bottles at home and now I just do the same when out -- and I can attest, it is only fractionally more work than disposables, with none of the guilt. I am always surprised at how easy it really all is - just two extra loads of laundry per week and we save lots of money and tons of waste. When I think about how many diapers go into landfills I literally shudder and I feel a little modicum of guilt slip away every time I don't add to that mountain of chemicals and plastic. Now, I will also have to cop to the fact that I have used disposables, mostly the one nighttime diaper and recently I began to think about how even with only one disposable a day we are still putting 365 diapers a year into landfills, so I started last night with cloth for bedtime and I can tell you, we all woke up happy after a lovely night of sleep and I am once again pleased at how wonderful this system is. My daughter never gets diaper rash - and only ever has when we've used commercial wipes (even though we used Seventh Generation) and disposable diapers. Karen at New and Green has some wonderful info that she emails you throughout your trial and the numbers and the facts about chemicals and pollution associated with the diapering of Western babies is gobsmacking.

I know that cloth diapering is not for everybody, but this is a world facing intense pressure with the growth of populations and the voracity of our appetites for disposable goods. I sat Nahanni in front of the display at the Vancouver Aquarium the other day that showed the number of plastic bags an average household uses in a year and the depression washed over me like a wave. I wonder what that display would look like with disposable diapers?

I know being environmentally conscious is hard. Hell, sometimes just being conscious at all is hard, but I really wanted to attest to the fact that it really is not nearly as hard as one might imagine. It has honestly been a blip on the radar of effort for me and I am proud to be part of the solution, if only a little bit. Besides, I cannot resist her waddling through the apartment (high density living, another environmental plus! yeah, that's why we haven't moved...) in her bright pink diaper, chewing with her 6 little teeth on something or another. I know that the weight of her little carbon footprint is a little lighter and maybe if we all contribute a little bit we can leave a cleaner world for all these little bums.

Now, if I could just remember to bring those damned green grocery bags, I'd be a star...

Pieces of Me

I'm feeling fragmented, like there are only pieces of me, not a whole. In many ways I am feeling like I traded in parts of myself to get her. I would not trade her for anything but I do still want to be myself, to find myself again. I don't quite know what to do, where to be, how to be.

I find myself wandering through my days lately, not sure how to move forward. Part of this is a result of the inertia I so despise in the winter months, part of it is the result of being home, of the isolation that can come with being a mother, with having to be home for naptimes and even the merest of routine. And part of it is this sense that I do not know how to proceed anymore. When I was in the mad throes of ambition I feel like I knew how to move (although in retrospect, I clearly misjudged many things...but again, that's another blog) and that drove me through my days. But now, I'm in a different stage of my career, my daughter is my bigger priority, there is a strike; it's like running on a treadmill - and anyone who knows me knows how much I hate that, literally and figuratively. It is as though I don't know how to structure my life anymore since I don't have a driving force like ambition to lead me. I find myself feeling like I can't get something done because I don't know how long she will nap, for example. I pull out my research for publishing my children's book and I can't quite concentrate enough to make sense of it. So much of my life has been truncated; my sleep, my eating, my writing - and it is as though I no longer know how to do anything that requires any lengthy amount of concentration. I wonder when I will ever be able to finish the book I began writing before she was born - I know what happens (mostly) but when can I really focus on it enough to do it well? Sure, I could sit down and write all day, ignoring her little tugs at my pant legs, but then what would be the cost? I suppose that is the real test now that I am a mother, balancing her needs with mine. But at what cost to me is what I am wondering right now.

I find myself trawling through the internet sites for things like an MFA in Creative Writing, an MA in Journalism, Yoga Teacher Training -- and I just cannot see how I could make it work. Granted, I have always been better at 'no' than 'yes', but really - two years of full-time school (and the costs and pressures therein) - that would also mean not working as an actor, the job that has supported me, usually very well, for more than a decade. And it is what I love doing, really, but it isn't enough anymore. I don't think there are the opportunities that there used to be in general and especially in this climate of strikes, high Canadian dollar...and my decision not to move to LA at this point. Furthermore, I need more creatively. Sometimes when I read scripts I feel a wave of depression wash over me, a certain creative despair. I love to write, to feel words fling themselves from my mind to my fingers. I love to challenge of trying to mold and shape these thoughts in an effort to convey the experience of them - it makes me feel a small measure of control. I need to find something, somewhere to pour the pieces of me that I have worked on and saved up and that I think are worth something. Obviously I feel that the piece of me that is a mother is of extreme value, it gives me light and joy unlike any of the fleeting things I have enjoyed from my career - but at the same time, I worry that if I lose track of myself I will not be able to recover the woman I worked so hard to become. I have always needed something in my life to move towards, goals to achieve, accomplishments to be proud of. And, while I am immensely proud of Nahanni and of being a mother, I wonder what there is for me to be proud of outside that? Where are those missing pieces of me and how do I set them back together and find who I will be in the coming years?

I have no pithy conclusion to this, it isn't even terribly coherent, but it's apiece or two of me, mysterious little pictures cut off from the whole. I know if I keep gathering them I will eventually manage to create the picture. I don't know what it will be, that picture, but I sure hope it will be beautiful.

Rotten Mother 101

I am a bad mother. I admit it.

I am also a very, very good mother. I know it. It is the truest dichotomy of motherhood, that you can at once be a great and a terrible mother...and it is all good as long as the great outweighs the terrible. I will never be a perfect mother, no matter how much I try - and I do try. I do it all -- I've co-slept and breastfed and skin-to-skinned and made organic baby food and Mother Goosed and Baby-taled, worn her next to me since she was born, never let her cry it out, read to her in Spanish and French and teach her sign language and play music to her and take her to the aquarium and Bright Nights and mom and baby hiking and snowshoeing and and and....

And still, there are days when I am a bad mother.

The other day I managed to pack her up and cart her down to Commercial Drive where I was to meet Tracy at Little Nest, a restaurant that combines fabulous food with an kid-friendly environment, which was, unfortunately, closed. Tracy called me as I was pulling up, telling me the news and we decided then to meet at Cafe Du Soleil. I wrapped her up and rushed into the warm of the little cafe, where I ordered a cappucino and waited for Trace to arrive. And waited. And waited. I was staring out the window looking for her when the waitress plonked the steaming cup down directly in front of the sweeping tentacles of my 8-month old daughter. Annoyed, I managed to slide it from her grasp just as her hand reached into the puff of steam. My phone rang and it was Tracy - where was I? At Cafe Du Soleil - where was she? Why, at Cafe Deux Soleil, 8 blocks down the road. Argh. We'd both already ordered and we sighed as our efforts to finally spend some time together were foiled by the odd coincidence of two very closely named cafes. We laughed and agreed to meet up afterwards for what little time remained before Talulla's nap. I managed to feed her, feed myself and half-assed enjoy my coffee before beginning to pack her up again for the trek up to meet Tracy at Cafe Deux Soleil. I carted her off with me to the bathroom (an adventure unto itself) and when I got back I set her back into the high chair again - this time without buckling the strap as I reached down to quickly grab my purse and keys. Just as I reached in the bag I heard a clunk and a cry and when I turned back to her -- she wasn't there. My heart stabbed in my chest, I looked down to where she had slid under the table, past the place where the crossbar should have been on the high chair and saw my child stuck, barely hanging onto the gap between the chair that held her and the floor that wouldn't, and the look on her little face has haunted me for days. She looked terrified, upset...betrayed. I felt horrible, guilty, negligent. I scooped her up as fast as I could, wrestling her from the trap and clasping her to me, trying to figure out if she was hurt or just scared. I cradled her, crooned to her and she calmed down fast but I could not have felt worse. I could not believe that I, who is normally so diligent about everything, especially safety -- I could not believe that I had just failed her so explicitly. Yes, it was a freebie, one of those wonderful, painful gifts from the universe where you see what horror could have befallen your child but didn't, but still, I felt as bad as if she had clunked to the concrete floor. I think what haunted me the most was the idea that this kind of thing could happen with something much worse, some crucial detail and I ache at the very thought. I live in terror of becoming the story that gets passed around, the mother's horror story -- 'oh, she didn't do up the buckle and...', 'she didn't know it had been recalled and...', 'she didn't see that one little piece and...'

And and fucking and.

And she survived. And she was fine. And she forgot and forgave. The question is, how do I? How do I forgive myself for the times I fail her as a mother, big or small?

Rotten Mother 101.1

Usually Rotten Mother Days only happen when I have had too little sleep. This last time, I was just desperate, sick. Stuffy eggplant head, cotton mouth, pick-axes in my ears, I felt like I'd been run over by a truck. She woke in the morning and I just didn't have it in me. I staggered from bed and managed to change her diaper, get her dressed and then I just slumped down on the floor in a heap beside her. I just did not have any energy at all. Plagued again by piles of wasted minutes which avalanched themselves upon me in the night, compounded by the weight of this lingering cold, I felt unable to do anything. I grabbed the office paper box some gifts had come in and set her inside. I gave her a teething biscuit, the kind which normally terrify me (choking hazard, of course -- everything is a freakin' choking hazard. Even the slinky I bought for Christmas had a warning label on it) but I gave it to her anyway because it lasts longer by far than those little wisps of baby mum-mums. I lay in a muddied heap beside her while she gnawed away on the cookie, smearing it all over her face, pyjamas (Rotten Mother 101.1.1 - I left her in them for the day too) and the box. But there she sat for almost an hour and I survived that little bit more. I turned on the TV (yes, I did) and flicked it to Treehouse - infant crack. I do not as a rule let Nahanni watch TV, but again, this is Rotten Mother 101 and I sat her in that box and she stayed put and watched it for longer than I care to remember. And I made it through to naptime and I managed not to let her choke to death on a ginger vanilla teething biscuit. A successful day, I suppose.

Rotten Mother 101.2

Sick again, the box was no longer novel enough to offer me any real help. Worse today than yesterday I block her in with my aching body as best I can and catch little minutes of thin sleep, one eye open, ever-ready. Drifting, swimming in my own drippy misery, I just couldn't stay awake for the first time since I had her. Even recovering from the PPH, I didn't feel so helpless as that, so I Rotten Mommy'd again. I dug out the Jolly Jumper and popped her in. I lay down in a mess of pillows and blankets and I slept at her feet while she flitted and jumped to her heart's content. Thank merciful gods, I needed that sleep. Half an hour only, but it was there and it was real and I needed it like air.

I'm a mother. I do what I have to do. I do my very best to keep my child happy and healthy and safe so that she will grow up strong and brave and vibrant and make me proud. Someday we will laugh about this and many other such stories, I'm sure. I know it will not be the last of the weak days. But I also know that I adore my child, I live and breathe my daughter and as long as we both survive with an adequate number of freebies, I will do everything in my power to be the least Rotten Mother possible.